A host may have one or more built in peripherals, and/or may be arranged for coupling to one or more external peripherals. The set of peripherals is made available in the wireless docking environment to enable access to the peripherals that are locally connected through wire or wirelessly to the host through a set of general message exchange protocols via wireless communication. A host may also be a further mobile device having available one or more peripherals for a dockee.
In this context peripherals may be external devices like a display, keyboard, or mouse, or more complex devices like a heart monitor in a hospital. Peripherals may also be built in a host like a microphone or camera. For example, a TV may be also a host, i.e. the host is built in the TV and constitutes a host in combination with a number of peripherals such as the display, user control elements and audio output units. Accessing and/or using such peripherals and/or any other internal or external resources of the host may be called using peripheral services by the dockee as provided by a host via the wireless docking environment.
Host devices can offer access to their peripherals to provide all kinds of services via wireless communication such as Wi-Fi (as described in IEEE802.11). Such a set of peripherals and services may be called a wireless docking environment accommodated by a host. The wireless docking environment may include services such as video rendering, audio recording, detecting the presence of a person, using a USB device such as a keyboard or a mouse over Wi-Fi, etc. A host can ‘advertise’ these peripheral services over Wi-Fi, such that it is possible for other devices with a Wi-Fi radio to see what Wi-Fi peripherals are available in their vicinity. A Wi-Fi device may also ask (‘probe’) another Wi-Fi device about which Wi-Fi peripheral services it has to offer. Wi-Fi offers various ways to do such pre-association discovery.
Wireless docking is known, for example, from WO 2012/117306A1. A wireless docking station enables a wireless secured communication between at least one slave device and a master device.
The wireless docking host may provide information about its presence through a Wi-Fi beacon that dockees can use to select and initiate connections with a chosen host.
Applications running on the mobile device can make use of the peripherals once the portable device is docked with the host and enable the user to interact with these applications through the peripherals. In addition to input or output peripherals, also sensors may be available as peripherals, such as temperature sensor, blood pressure sensor, heart rate sensor, air quality sensor, presence sensor, etc., and could be included as part of a wireless docking environment. Such sensors can be used by the applications of the portable device to monitor the environment and adapt the behavior within these application based on the values provided by these sensors.
US2014/0146745 describes dockee centric wireless docking in a wireless docking system.
US2013/0309973 describes a system and method for persistent wireless docking.
WO2014/189661 describes a wireless docking architecture.